Three high-profile searches in Oregon — climbers stuck in a
blizzard on Mount Hood, a family stranded in their car on a
remote logging road, and a boy lost on foot in Crater Lake
National Park — show that where people get lost has a lot to do
with the nature of searches to find them.

But even highly organized searches don't guarantee happy
endings.

In each search — one run by county sheriff's departments, one
that mixed efforts by city and state police, counties, and the
victims' families, and one run by a top National Park Service
crisis management team — people died or were never found.

The search effort that has drawn the most scrutiny, for the
family of James Kim deep in a national forest near the Oregon
coast, has prompted calls for better information management by
searchers and coordination among state and county agencies.

Gov.
Ted Kulongoski has said he wants to look at reviews of the
recent searches to see where the state can offer help,
particularly on funding.

The vast majority of search and rescue missions end
successfully, and do not draw public notice. Only when things go
awry or people die do people start to question the system.

"It's kind of like a seat belt. It doesn't come into the
public's eye until you need it," said John Miller, search and
rescue coordinator for Lane County, which conducted 115 of the
996 search and rescue missions in Oregon last year — the most of
any county in Oregon.

Few last more than a day, Miller said. "Those are the ones you
have the least opportunity to participate in and you probably
have the least experience dealing with because they are so
infrequent. Consequently, those are the ones with the most
potential for loss of life, too."

Miller feels training and funding around the state are
inconsistent, and could be improved.

That view is not fully embraced by state search and rescue
coordinator Georges Kleinbaum.

"Those of us at the state don't feel there is any lack of
competence," Kleinbaum said. "I know we've got three
high-profile missions very recently. There are still another 800
or 900 this year alone that weren't high profile."

The state offers advanced training but does not require it for
coordinators, who usually have other duties to juggle, Kleinbaum
said. His office requires volunteers and coordinators to go
through a basic training course, which includes map reading,
survival skills and the structure of the incident command system
that is now standard for wildfires and emergencies. But the
agency does not keep track of what training each county
coordinator has, figuring someone with experience but no
training is better than no one at all.

The situation varies from state to state in the West, and from
county to county within many states.

Throughout the West, county sheriffs traditionally have
jurisdiction over search and rescue operations, except in
national parks, and the priority each sheriff gives search and
rescue funding, training, equipment and personnel ultimately
determines how good they are.

In Oregon, state law put sheriffs in charge, and they often
delegate the responsibility to a search and rescue coordinator,
who may also be a deputy or emergency services director. Many
rural counties are strapped financially, looking at cutting
sheriff's patrols, closing libraries and reducing road
maintenance. Federal timber payments have helped them build up
search and rescue equipment, but expired this year, leaving
funding in doubt. Search programs are almost exclusively staffed
by volunteers.

"The trick is, if you want to get lost in a state that uses a
sheriff's coordinator, you want to pick your county to get lost
in," said Rick Goodman, the retired head of search and rescue
for New Mexico state police and a training consultant. "Some
counties are up to the state of the art. Other counties don't
have a lot of missions and could use some expertise."

After problems with some searches, New Mexico took authority
away from county sheriffs in 1978.

"Everywhere I go, almost, I think, 'Boy if I wanted my kids to
get lost, I'd have them do it in New Mexico,' " said Goodman,
who helped write the law.

In New Mexico, searches on the scale of the three recent
high-profile Oregon cases would have required what is called
Type I management, run by an experienced and highly trained team
vetted by state police.

A search and rescue advisory board reviews searches, and in
cases involving injury or death sends its findings to the
attorney general. State police can require coordinators to get
more training, or pull their certification.

"Somewhere there needs to be a body that can review these things
and make some findings of fact and recommend or mandate that
changes are made so you have better coordination, better
resources allocation," said Goodman.

In Oregon, state officials can review the conduct of a search,
but have no enforcement power if they find negligence or
incompetence.

The three recent searches in Oregon are marked by differences.

The most recent one, for three out-of-state climbers lost on
Mount Hood, was run by the Hood River County sheriff's
department, which conducts 10 to 20 per year on the state's
highest peak.

Hood River and neighboring Clackamas County, which cover Mount
Hood, have developed a "playbook" based on the many searches,
and when they were notified three climbers were missing earlier
this month, they went right to the book, said Hood River Sheriff
Joe Wampler.

"Between them and us we opened that book, and page by page went
down through there. It makes us feel good that all that practice
and planning works," said Wampler, himself an experienced
climber and licensed pilot.

Wampler's department was able to call on mountain rescue teams
from Portland, Eugene and Corvallis, and Army National Guard
helicopters. The mountain rescue teams are volunteers. The
National Guard does not charge for flight time, writing it off
as training.

Despite high levels of training and experience and a good idea
where the climbers were, rescuers were kept off the mountain for
days by howling storms. They found one climber dead, and have
yet to find the other two.

The search for San Francisco online editor James Kim and his
family has raised different kinds of questions. A series of
articles by The Oregonian suggested officials in Josephine
County, where the Kims eventually were found, did not have an
efficient means of tracking information, including tips on what
road they might have taken, or the point of origin of signals
sent by Kim's cell phone.

Ultimately, a local helicopter pilot not connected to the search
and acting on a hunch found Kati Kim and her daughters on a
remote logging road that was supposed to be locked shut in the
winter. It was not. James Kim was found days later, dead of
exposure in a stream well away from the logging road.

Josephine County Sheriff Dave Daniel defended the training,
experience and performance of his search and rescue team, adding
that ultimate responsibility must fall on the Kims, who passed
four signs warning snow could block the road ahead.

"My heart goes out to the Kim family and the families of the men
up on Mount Hood," Daniel said. "But the truth of the matter is
in the past eight years I've been sheriff, we've done 34 search
and rescue operations in wintertime up there on Bear Camp Road.
In the majority of these cases, they are people that lack common
sense. They are driving into snow in passenger vehicles on what
is at best a two-lane road and sometimes a one-lane road."

Unlike the hunt for the Kims, conducted by a variety of state
and county agencies, the search for 8-year-old Sammy Boelke, who
ran away from his father last October in Crater Lake National
Park, was coordinated by crisis management experts.

Denny Ziemann, chief ranger at Mojave National Preserve in
California, was called in with his incident management team,
which had experience from forest fires, searches and Hurricane
Katrina. Besides his management team, which includes chiefs of
operations, logistics, planning and finance, he called in
hundreds of searchers, including elite wildland firefighters
known as hotshots, who did intense grid searches.

But they could not find the boy.

"We felt very comfortable with everything we did, the tactics we
used, and felt like we were looking in the right places in the
right ways," Ziemann said. "Sometimes that just doesn't work."